Thursday, 17 May 2012

I'm
walking in the park, it's fall, looks like somebody got killed. Until
yesterday, I thought my life could be different. I was in love, etc. I
stop by the fountain, it's dark, the surface shiny, but when I brush it
with the palm of my hand I feel how rough it really is. From here I
watch an old cop approach the body with hesitant steps. A cold breeze is
blowing, raising goose bumps. The cop kneels by the body: with a
dejected gesture he covers his eyes with his left hand. A flock of
starlings rise. They circle over the policeman's head and then
disappear. The policeman goes through the dead man's pockets and piles
what he finds on a white handkerchief that he's spread out on the grass.
Dark green grass that seems to want to swallow up the white square.
Maybe it's the dark old papers that the cop sets on the handkerchief
that make me think this way. I decide to sit down for a while. The park
benches are white with wrought-iron legs. A police car comes down the
street. It stops. Two cops get out. One of them heads toward where the
old cop is crouched. The other waits by the car and lights a cigarette. A
while later an ambulance silently appears and parks behind the police
car. "I didn't see anything"... "A dead man in the park"..."An old
cop"...

8 comments:

Extraordinary, that red-wing starling in flight across the Taita-Hills of Kenya, and that gesture ‘the old cop’ makes, covering his eyes, that’s extraordinary too; and Bolaño seeing that and calling our attention to it in a moment of time that for him is both now and yesterday, a litany of the mundane details of a place where one’s life ceased to be different.

Writ at 27, a loose collection of drifting fragments, this early work of Bolaño's doesn't have the headlong narrative momentum of the later masterpieces, but possesses its own kind of strength, in slow-moving, knife-like sentences that go in deep and keep on twisting and turning in the memory.

The atmosphere of violence, darkness and crime, with cops and bodies in every shadowy nook and cranny, here documents Bolaño's experience of the same Mexico City underworlds travelled by the unblinking photojournalist Metinides.

Some of the short poetic bits here could make captions for the arresting photos of "The Greek".

Already Bolaño's got the inside/outside narrative going. The flow of images in the text and the photos is cinematic with occasional freeze-frames or maybe I am just letting the reel break and flap while recovering my breath before the rain god swallows me whole...the dark/white, the matter of fact pronouncements of different deaths, it's Mexico City Noir... funny, like Bolaño, starlings were not native to Mexico, yet adapted supremely to a wide range of habitats. But that may be just coincidence.

I think Hazen has pretty well summed up what this post is all about--Bolaño's piece is stunning by itself but reading it next to Metinidis' photo and those of the starlings literally takes our breath away.